Citizen Power

Last week in Time magazine they ran an article called “The Happiness Effect” about how happiness might be catching. Personally, I think this is certainly true if you are talking about smiling — when a person smiles, it’s often easy to smile back and instantly feel a little better. I think of it as spreading like a yawn, when someone yawns and you soon yawn too, wthout really realizing why. Are we just imitating each other? Not consciously, but we do.

So perhaps it’s not really “happiness” spreading but just smiling and a moment of feeling like smiling — a sort of faux happiness. The same is true of looking at photos of people smiling, and watching a sitcom or comedy. You laugh, you feel happy and you are cheered up — but that’s not really lasting happiness as I would define it. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Do external factors of life affect our mood? Sure they do. But, if “catching happiness” virally is all it took to be happy, you could sit world leaders down in a room and show them a few funny movies, and all our problems would be solved! It strikes me that world leaders who start wars, for instance, are very very unhappy people. They would never admit that to you, but they must be.

Now, public health officials are studying happiness. Happier people tend to be healthier people, and often, if your friends and family members are happy, you are too. We are social animals, and we are plugged in to a large social consciousness that “transcends” our individual happiness. This makes me wonder, can a country be happy, in general? Can it also be depressed, collectively? That would explain the dark cloud we all felt this last 8 years. But going even further, scientists wonder if happiness is like a collection of microbes, like the common cold, that you can “catch” from other people. The article in Time cites a study that was published in the British Medial Journal. The emotional states of about 5,000 people were studied, as well as the social ties they shared, including their online ties. Because of these social ties and connections, the scientists doing the study were able to discover something very interesting. If a subject’s friend was happy, that subject was 15% more likely to be happy too. If that subject’s friend was unhappy, the subject was 10% more likely to be so.

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